Reviewing young adult, new adult, and romance since 2013.

None of what I’d done looked good – in fact, much of it looked horrendously stupid in hindsight.

That one sentence perfectly summarizes what’s wrong with this book. Ruby Rose, self professed genius, who constantly discusses her perfect GPA and extensive training at the beginning of the novel, is an idiot. Ruby, whose father evidently spent the first sixteen years of her life preparing her for every catastrophe, every possible horrible situation she could be in, does not have a single ounce of common sense. And forget about Ruby for a second – what parents give their sixteen-year-old daughter an SUV with dark tinted windows, a license to carry a concealed weapon, and, oh yeah, a gun? It’s like they’re setting her up to make terrible decisions.

Ruby Rose, now seventeen years old, keeps a revolver in her car.

Opening the false bottom of my console, I looked down at the shimmering weapon – aka Smith, my .38 Special Revolver with built-in laser sight that I’d gotten for my Sweet Sixteenth.

And even though she doesn’t believe in actually using her gun (she tells Liam, her sorta-boyfriend, that it’s not ok to kill people), she somehow winds up killing several people throughout the course of the book.

Ruby consistently puts herself in impossible situations. It’s late at night and her boyfriend is out of town, so she figures she’ll do something normal and relaxing, like, oh, I don’t know… stalking her stalker and trying to find his boat at the marina.

…logic told me to wait for Liam.

Except, logic also told me that I was fully capable of walking a hundred yards to ask one stupid question.

So what does Ruby do? She tries to send him a text telling him that she’s being an idiot.

But as soon as I pressed “Send,” the message came back undelivered with a huge exclamation point indicating no service. Just perfect.

Does Ruby take this as a sign? Of course not! She presses on and ends up nearly drowning while killing somebody. Again.

At least the other characters make sense. Oh, wait. No. I’m thinking of the wrong book. Literally all of the characters are awful.

Dr. T is literally the worst therapist ever. She cuts sessions off early, cancels them for no reason when she feels uncomfortable with information that Ruby reveals, and even goes so far as to tell her client not to “go crazy.”

Alana is a terrible friend. Ruby is still mourning her father’s death, and just accidentally killed a sex offender, but Alana tells her she needs to suck it up and start going to parties and dating again. Because clearly, boys will cure all evils. Add to that the fact that Alana throws a temper tantrum when Ruby needs her most, refusing to speak with her or even acknowledge that she’s alive, and generally acts like a toddler throughout at least half of the book.

Ruby’s mother is laughable. As the district attorney, she’s infamous for letting criminals go on technicalities, yet she’s still leading in the polls for the next election? What? As a parent, she’s even worse, abandoning her daughter nearly 100% of the time in favor of work or campaign events or alcohol. When she is around, she mostly just yells at Ruby and pushes her away while asking her why she won’t share what’s going on. At the end of the book, Ruby’s mother’s darkest secret is revealed, and it’s almost unsurprising, given what an awful woman she is.

The police in the book are terrible as well. They’re known for bungling even the simplest arrests, and evidently the SWAT team is so incompetent, or corrupt, or both, that a teenage girl feels the need to do their job for them. (And, if we’re being honest, at least Ruby manages to get the criminals off the streets, even if she does have to kill them to do it.)

The writing is ok at best, and laughable at worst.

The sky was lit up like a melting bag of Skittles.

What is that metaphor? I don’t think I’ve ever looked at a sunset and thought, hey, that looks a lot like a melting bag of Skittles, but maybe I’ve just lived a boring life.

“Mamacita! Estás lista?” he called into the back rooms. I hadn’t realized he spoke fluent Spanish.

I hadn’t realized that knowing three words meant that you were fluent.

“I win the contest for Most Screwed-Up Girl and Idiot of the Year.”

Oh, look. It’s an accurate statement.

Given how much I struggled to make it through this book (it took me almost a week to read 300 pages), I can’t rate it any higher than two stars. But then, if I do my automatic star subtraction for the entirely unrealistic situation and poor writing, it actually ends up with no stars. Since no stars isn’t an option, I’ll have to settle for one.

Killing Ruby Rose is not recommended.

(I received a free copy of this book via Amazon’s Kindle First program. This clearly did not influence my rating.)